


The Flower Thief

by EchoResonance



Category: D.Gray-man
Genre: Flowers, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-29
Updated: 2015-07-28
Packaged: 2018-04-11 20:19:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4450820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EchoResonance/pseuds/EchoResonance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>So I found this idea on tumblr under the title "Awful AU" where person A has been stealing flowers from person B's garden to take to a loved one's grave, then one day B catches them and demands to see the person A was stealing flowers for. The entire way to the cemetery, person A sweats about how to break the bad news.</p></blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Allen didn’t really feel all that bad, taking a flower from _that_ garden every few days. Really, the guy wasn’t exactly popular in the neighborhood, and the few encounters Allen had with him were not exactly pleasant, so there wasn’t much cause for guilt. They were just flowers, and...well, they were flowers. Free flowers, easily accessible, and on the way. If a little sleight of hand was required, so be it. He was hardly a stranger to those sorts of antics.

Arms swinging casually down by his sides, Allen strolled along the sidewalk like any other pedestrian, tilting his head back and letting the sun warm his cheeks. It was a wonderful day out, and lots of children were enjoying it to the fullest, playing in their yard sprinklers and drawing in their driveways with colored chalk. A couple of girls were chasing each other around the tree in their yard, laughing loudly, and a boy was trying to beat his previous height while climbing the same tree. There was a nagging feeling in Allen’s stomach that was afraid the little boy might fall on the girls, but he shrugged his worry off after calling for the boy to be careful and having the kid stick his tongue out at him.

Of course, _his_ yard was as uninhabited as ever. The grass was getting pretty long again, but he rarely made an attempt to mow it, so that wasn’t exactly a shock. Neither were the vines that were creeping up the latticework standing in various spots in the garden, though they just gave the yard more character. It was a nice garden in truth; something about the near-wildness of it was beautiful and refreshing in its own way, surrounded by perfectly manicured lawns with nary a weed in sight, even if it came from neglect and not intent. Whatever the case, Allen liked it. The flowers that he grew were beautiful too, and they complemented the rest of the scenery pretty well. They weren’t big or bright, but that made them stand out more. Allen had never seen irises before this garden, but he knew instinctively that these in particular were uncommon for the species; they were almost entirely white, with just the faintest traces of pale violet streaks veining their curved petals. They grew in clumps right up against the house, and also conveniently right along the sidewalk .

Mana liked them. He commented on them whenever the two of them would walk past the yard, back to when Allen was maybe five. That was why he would pick them when he walked by. So that he could take them to Mana.

Allen was just crouching down, fingers curling around a particularly full bloom, when a loud voice met his ears and he yelped, leaping back with the stem still in hand as his heart attempted to burst right out of his chest. The flower broke off and went with him as he stumbled back and fell on his backside.

“So you’re the one that’s been picking these flowers,” growled a menacing voice.

A shadow loomed over Allen and he hesitantly looked up, trembling violently. Yeah, that was him alright. Tall as ever, with the same mean scowl he was always wearing. His hair was tied back into a long ponytail, but if it was to combat the heat he was doing it the wrong way, considering he was still wearing a sweeping black coat buttoned up to his throat. The sleeves weren’t even pushed up. He had to have been sweating something fierce in that thing.

The look in his cold eyes reminded Allen that the man’s level of comfort with the weather should not be his primary focus, and he tried to blurt out some kind of excuse or explanation that wouldn’t sound completely stupid, but all he spouted was incoherent nonsense. The man who grew the flowers continued to glare at Allen like he was trying to turn him into stone.

“Mind telling me what makes these flowers worth your life, beansprout?” he growled.

Allen bristled at once.

“You’re not that much taller than me, Ba-Kanda,” he snapped, but he shuddered as that demon glare somehow increased in intensity.

“You’d better have a good reason for stealing from my garden,” Kanda said, his voice like shards of ice. “Or I’ll cut you to ribbons right here.”

Allen’s grey eyes flicked to Kanda’s hip, where the young man always had a sword hanging in its sheathe for some reason. Apparently nobody had told him that European suburbs had evolved past the Edo period in Japan. He called it Mugen, but whatever its name was it was more than capable of gutting anyone like a fish, so he didn’t really want to meet the sharp end. Or the pointy part. Or any bit of it, to be perfectly honest.

“W-well, you see, I was--I was just--” Allen babbled, scrambling backwards on the sidewalk. He followed calmly, his footfalls nearly silent on the concrete.

“Can’t be that important if you can’t even get a pitiful excuse out,” the man noted, his lip curling.

Kanda glowered balefully down at the flower thief, his fingers brushing Mugen’s hilt. It was a mostly empty threat, but he wasn’t above drawing it and maybe slicing a few strands of that platinum white hair just to scare the kid. Anyone that stole from him deserved at least that much, especially those flowers. Nobody touched them.

“I was just taking them to--to someone--someone very important to me!” the boy exclaimed, raising his left arm to shield his face. “They really love these flowers, and I--I thought that if--well, I was hoping that the flowers would make them happy.”

There was a pause in which Kanda registered that the kid hadn’t wrapped his arm like he normally did, and that burn was far bigger than he’d ever realized. He would’ve thought at most that it might go up to the kid’s elbow from some kind of stupid accident. Falling into a campfire, dowsing it in boiling water, whatever. But it went clear up past the sleeve of his t-shirt.

“Is that so?” he said skeptically, not voicing his most recent thoughts. The beansprout nodded vigorously. “And this... _person_ is close enough to you to warrant theft of someone else’s property?”

Allen balked and a strangled sort of scream left him when something flashed in the sunlight quick as a bullet. His hair ruffled in a sudden, inexplicable breeze as something flew millimeters from his face to embed itself in the sidewalk. Haltingly he looked over, movements as stiff and jerky as a poorly constructed robot, and saw the sword shivering in the crack between two squares of concrete, its blade gleaming in the sun. He hadn’t even seen Kanda move, but then the man was quick, especially when he was irritated. Which tended to be the majority of the time.

“I’d like to see this person,” Kanda said quietly, pointedly ignoring the boy’s terrified tremors. “Quite frankly I don’t believe you have a decent reason and I don’t really care even if you do have one, but this person of yours doesn’t even know they’re guilty yet, do they?”

The beansprout swallowed convulsively, and there was a flash of something in his eyes. Fear? No, more like reluctance. What did he not want to share? Had he been lying about his intentions with the flowers and didn’t want to be caught? Well that was too bad.

Kanda sneered and returned Mugen to its sheathe before straightening up and crossing his arms, impatiently waiting for the kid to climb to his feet. He did, brushing himself off with his left hand since the right still held the flower. Kanda’s eyes followed the movement and the boy paused, his shoulders tightening.

The swordsman pressed his lips together, feelings the slightest twinge of discomfort, though he couldn’t quite place it. Every time they saw each other, that was what he looked at. Not the boy, but his left arm. Sometimes he’d get close to making eye contact, but he shouldn’t let himself get excited because Kanda was only looking at his left eye. He didn’t have much in the way of tact, but it was low on his list of concerns

“Well?” he prompted when Allen didn’t move. “Lead the way, beansprout. I’d like to teach your friend a lesson.”

“I...You can’t,” he said bluntly, taking one step back. Kanda followed.

“Can’t I?” he said. His eyebrows were so close together that they might as well be a single brow with the level of his glare. The thought almost made Allen want to laugh, but this wasn’t really the time.

“I can’t take you,” the boy told him. “You don’t understand, they--”

“You’re taking me to your friend, or I’ll find them myself after I cut you off at the knees and make you even shorter.”

Tempers were always high between them, hackles always up, but Kanda took some amusement when the kid’s rose even higher, especially at jabs about his height. However, he didn’t rise to the bait. Not this time, at any rate. Clearly he had a goal in mind and had no plans to continue entertaining the owner of the flowers.

“Look, you can follow me or not, I don’t really care,” he grumbled, turning on his heel and striding away. “But I’m still saying you can’t meet them.”

“Do I look like I give a shit what you tell me?” Kanda growled.

With a few of his much longer strides, he easily fell back into place at the boy’s shoulder before he could get far, his sword clinking slightly at his side.

Sighing, Allen reached up to push his hair out of his face, catching sight of my arm as he did. He grimaced. It was getting better, but it was always gonna look like that; discolored and raw, red with patches of darker red and brittle and flaky, with no fingernails to speak of. He shuddered and let it fall back to his side. It had regained most of its mobility, but that didn’t change the fact that it would always look ravaged and almost dead. It wasn’t pretty. He usually wrapped it up just so that he didn’t have to deal with the staring and the questions and the muttered remarks that no one thought he could hear, but he’d been in a hurry that morning and completely forgot.

In all fairness, it was difficult not to look at it, and generally he didn’t begrudge the stares, but Kanda made no attempt to be subtle with his disgust for the arm, and he certainly didn’t care if Allen noticed. It was like the older boy specifically wanted to get under his skin, as if he was trying incredibly hard to make Allen hate him. A stupid thought, of course--Allen probably barely ever entered his head unless he was in a particularly foul mood, and he most likely spent the majority of his time not being aware of the boy’s existence at all. Whatever.

As they grew nearer to the destination, Allen started to have misgivings about telling Kanda that he didn’t care if he followed him.

 _Should I...should I tell him?_ He should definitely say something, even if the odds were high he wouldn’t listen. But what? How? There wasn’t exactly a delicate way to explain why Allen was hesitating at the gate…

“Well beansprout?” Kanda said irritably. A vein began throbbing in Allen’s temple. “Get to moving, or do I need to motivate you some more?”

With great effort, Allen took a deep breath and ignored him, turning to walk through the gates.

“Hey!” he shouted, taken aback by the change in direction. “You think you can lose me just by walking through some old cemetery? I’m not afraid of ghosts, kid!”

“I didn’t think you were,” he responded dryly. “I’m not trying to shake you off. I have a feeling you’d just be a bigger pain in my neck if I did.”

“Like you’re one to talk,” Kanda said, catching up easily. “Don’t tell me you’re actually meeting that ‘important person’ of yours here of all places?”

“Well, yeah,” Allen said. Damnit, there really was no easy or slow way to tell him. Should just rip off the bandaid. “There really isn’t anywhere else we can meet.”

“Okay, that’s weird, even for a freaky beansprout like you,” Kanda noted. “What kind of person can’t you meet...outside of…”

Ignoring him altogether, Allen stopped walking beside a large, roughly made headstone. It was cheap and poorly done, and even though it was only a couple years old it was already wearing down from rain and wind, but the words were still pretty legible, and as he  knelt down with the iris in hand he couldn’t help but read them, even though he had already done so hundreds of times. There wasn’t much there, and he had known the words by heart even before he had gone.

_Mana Walker_

_“Never stop. Always keep walking.”_

There was no age on the stone. Probably nobody had known it, though what kind of person wouldn’t know their own birthday was a mystery to Kanda. He didn’t particularly care about the man under the headstone, though. Obviously he had no reason to--he didn’t have the slightest idea who it was. But he was more than a little shocked to see the kid that looked twelve years old kneeling in front of a grave, holding a stolen flower like he had probably done dozens of times. Kanda didn’t know how to react.

“Hey, Mana,” the boy said softly, laying the flower down in front of the headstone. “I hope you don’t mind, but I kind of brought some company today.”

Kanda sucked in a sharp breath, feeling suddenly that he was intruding on something that he never should have seen. In a sense, he supposed he was. Allen twitched at the noise, but didn’t look around.

“I’m still okay,” he told the stone, a smile in his voice. “I got a job at the theatre in town; they hired me for publicity. Apparently those tricks you taught me attract a lot of attention. But I guess that was the point, right?”

He pushed his hair back again.

“My arm’s almost totally better, too!” he said, flexing the fingers of his burned hand. “I can do all those card tricks again, which is nice. They said my eye was pretty much done for, but it could’ve been way worse, right?”

His eye? Kanda frowned. He’d noticed some scarring around the boy’s eye, most noticeably the star-shaped burn right above it, but had something hurt the actual thing?

“I mean, I’m still here...So that’s something. I’m still moving.”

His voice broke a little, and Kanda felt his own throat close. He shouldn’t have come, this was something private and intimate and he did not belong there. But there was no way for him to leave now without making the situation even worse, so he just stood there, pretending not to notice as the boy rubbed his eyes furiously. Still, as the uncomfortable silence stretched on, he figured it was time for him to leave regardless of how rude it might seem. He didn’t want to be the third party observer to somebody else’s grief, and though he explained it to himself as simply having no interest in other people’s feelings getting in the way, he also knew that grief was...inexplicably private. However, just as he was turning to leave, the boy abruptly stood up, brushing his clothes off hastily.

“Well, uh, bye,” he said awkwardly. “I’ll be back soon, I promise!”

Some part of Kanda’s mind registered that Allen had turned around, but he didn’t pay him much attention. No, his dark eyes had landed on the headstone again, and on the flower laying at its base, probably the same way as had many before it. How long had he been coming here? How long had he been picking those flowers and bringing them to this grave? How long…

“Um…” he mumbled, scratching the back of his neck.

Kanda jerked around suddenly, startled out of his thoughts, and his mask of cold gargoyle-like composure slammed back into place. Whatever the reasons, the kid was still a brat stealing from his yard.

“You done?” he said cooly. Allen nodded, shoulders rounded forward in discomfort.

Kanda didn’t say a word the whole way back to his place, and he suspected Allen was hoping that he would just let him leave in peace. He had a feeling that the boy would never take his flowers again, and a moment later the he confirmed as much: it was not worth the embarrassment, Allen said bluntly, so there shouldn’t really be any reason not to let him be on his way. Of course, that was with the optimistic hope that Kanda wouldn’t want to filet him anyway for taking his flowers for this long just to make a point. There was no way the kid actually believed that he’d get off scot-free, though, because he didn’t seem to be stupid so much as reckless. Therefore it wasn’t surprising that he seemed scared, if not surprised when Kanda’s long-fingered hand clamped down on his shoulder.

“Gah--I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said immediately, turning and bowing repeatedly. “I won’t take your flowers anymore, so please don’t kill me.”

Startled momentarily by the vehement outburst, Kanda said nothing, and he noticed Allen tensing up like he was ready to run for his life. The swordsman shifted his feet uncomfortably.

“Who was he?”

The boy went still, glancing up through his shaggy hair to look at Kanda, who wasn’t looking at him in favor of a spot a few feet to his right.

“He was my father,” Allen said as he straightened up, watching him warily. “Well, not biologically. He adopted me when I was very young.”

“How long have you been stealing my flowers?”

Allen’s lips twitched. The real question, the one caught in Kanda’s throat, was _When did he die_? But his pride couldn’t stand voicing any actual interest or, God help him, concern, so he had to hope that the beansprout was smart enough to catch the implication..

“About six years,” I said. “He died in a fire when I was ten.”

Kanda blinked and looked around sharply, his gaze falling on the left side of the boy’s face, the side that was badly scarred. Ten? But then...that would make him sixteen...and who had been taking care of him since then? Kanda never saw him with anyone else.

“A fire, huh?” Kanda said thoughtfully. He pointed at the scarring around the eye. “Is that how you burned your face?”

Not the most tactful of approaches, but direct had always been his forte, and it was better than dancing around the actual question.

“Yeah,” Allen told him. “He got me out, but I’ll have these scars for the rest of my life. My arm’s the same way.”

His eyes flickered down to the arm again. So that was how he’d been injured. Kanda blew a long breath out his nose and let his hand fall from Mugen’s hilt.

“Get out of here,” he grumbled, turning away. “Before I change my mind and cut you into pieces.”

“U-um…” the boy stammered, confused.

“I don’t care about whatever sob story you’re building in your head right now, so just get out of here. I’d better not catch you taking these flowers again.”

“R-right, sorry,” Allen blurted, and quick footsteps sounded on the concrete, fading soon into nothing as the boy retreated.

Kanda looked over his shoulder after him, a slight breeze ruffling his long jacket and blowing his hair into his face. He glanced at the irises, spying the several broken stems left behind by that boy.

“Tch.”

He turned and went back inside, slamming the door behind him.

 


	2. Chapter 2

That boy was too familiar. Too happy, too optimistic, always trying too hard to be everybody’s friend. It was like he didn’t have a care in the world, like his life was nothing but happiness and friends and family, even though it might be the farthest thing from that. How could someone shine so brightly that they were blinding to look at, when they were most familiar with darkness? It just didn’t make sense.

Kanda scowled and looked out the window at the flowers swaying lazily by the sidewalk. They weren’t just flowers, and he wasn’t like some old badger throwing a tantrum because some kid was taking something that had taken him a whole ten minutes to plant. Those irises were incredibly significant, and though quite honestly they and the reason he grew them pissed him off, on a deeper level they provided both hurt and some small comfort. They were long-lasting reminders of another kid, obnoxiously bright and happy despite having little reason to be, that Kanda had known a very long time ago.

Sometimes the word ‘friend’ would escape him unbidden and he would instantly deny it, but there was truth in it all the same. That boy from years ago had touched him and left him strange and confusing emotions, feelings like happiness and friendship which he had never been familiar with, even growing up surrounded by others as he was. The orphanage had always been packed, and still Kanda had always been alone until that stupid kid came along, forcing himself into spaces where he wasn’t invited.

The irises outside reminded Kanda of him. He wasn’t exactly sure why, as the boy had never really shown much interest in flowers at all, but something about those particular blooms always brought that kid to the forefront of Kanda’s thoughts. Whatever it was about those pale irises, there was no denying that he felt like they linked him to that other boy, whether he liked it or not. It might have simply been because they had first grown in the gardens of the orphanage, that he’d always connected his own life to those blooms and had always had an unspoken fear that when they died, so would he. It was stupid and childish, but it was something that the other boy seemed able to understand, even if Kanda never said so.

Allen was entirely too much like Alma. Kanda had seen him many times, always pulling people together and refusing to keep his nose out of other people’s business, and there had been several occasions in which he--Allen--had tried to get Kanda to get more involved with others. He would always respond with some variation of “no way in hell,” along with some quip about his height, and Allen would bristle like an angry housecat before stalking away in irritation.

The boy always came back. Even after he promised not to take the flowers anymore, he would still walk by Kanda’s house and pause to look at them, sometimes to touch a petal or smell one particular bloom. He looked at them with a curious wistfulness, something in his eyes triggering a strange, tugging sensation in Kanda’s chest whenever he caught it. It was probably because, like the irises tied Kanda to Alma, they tied Allen to his father Mana. There was no legitimate significance to the flower alone, but someone he had cared about had cared about those flowers, and that was enough to form a connection to them himself.

Losing a connection like that was hard. Kanda had been nine when he met Alma, and though he never openly liked the stranger, he did grow somewhat fond of him. Always following him around, talking incessantly as if he cared about what Kanda thought or what kind of stuff he liked. They hadn’t known each other long when it became obvious that Alma was sick, though. Very sick. They didn’t know what it was, or if they did they wouldn’t tell Kanda, but it made the boy scared to see the newcomer begin to slip away just like that. They hadn’t known each other for two years when Alma passed, his condition making him almost unrecognizable behaviorally as well as physically. Kanda knew now that it was probably some sort of brain tumor that had taken his first--and only--friend, but it did little to ease the twinge in his heart whenever he saw those wretched flowers.

He wondered if Allen felt the same about his father, Mana.

Kanda sighed to himself and rose to his feet. There might be something he could do to make things a little better, for Allen’s situation at least. He didn’t particularly care about the boy, though, he just didn’t need to see him looking so woefully at his own garden. It was weird.

He definitely didn’t care if the boy was actually happy or not.

* * *

The sun was going down by the time Allen had gotten off work, but he had to visit Mana before he went home. The dark didn’t particularly bother him anyway, so there was no reason for him to put off his visit until the following day. He stretched his arms over his head, sighing as his wrists and fingers popped and his shoulders burned. He’d been out performing tricks in front of the theatre all day, and his body was quite stiff, but at least he was having fun in the moment. Performing card tricks for little kids and juggling a ridiculous amount of objects was great entertainment for himself as well as the watchers, and he loved sending off the little ones with big smiles on their faces.

Sighing contentedly he folded his arms behind his head as he walked, enjoying the cool evening breeze after spending all day working up quite the sweat. His stomach growled ferociously and he cringed. He’d worked up quite the appetite as well. Once he got home he was going to make himself a feast.

As always, he slowed at Kanda’s house, pausing to admire the flowers. He had kept true to his word and refrained from taking anymore, partially due to fear for his own life and partially due to the fact that he had promised not to, and he always kept his word. However, he still stopped to look at them anyway, the way Mana used to. He knelt down and pinched a petal between his thumb and forefinger, enjoying the softness against his skin.

“You’d better not be picking those flowers again, beansprout.”

Allen bristled and whipped around. Kanda was leaning against the doorframe, looking at him shrewdly with his hard black eyes. His black hair wasn’t tied back like it usually was and hung straight as a ruler to his waist, reflecting blue highlights in the dying sunlight. He wasn’t wearing his coat either, which left him in a plain white button-down shirt tucked into loose black pants.

“Of course not,” Allen snapped. “And I told you, my name is Allen!”

“Whatever,” Kanda replied, pushing his hair back out of his face. “Get out of here, you’re already late.”

Allen blinked, then straightened up and turned on his heel to march down the sidewalk. He thought he heard something follow him, a light sound carried on the breeze, and though he couldn’t be sure, he thought it sounded like a chuckle. Startled, he glanced over his shoulder just in time to see the older boy’s hair whip out of sight around the door. Frowning, he turned back and continued on his way.

As late as it was, nobody else was out to talk to him or harass him, and somehow he ended up at the gate to the cemetery surprisingly quickly. Allen pushed his hair out of his eyes and entered, gaze already set on Mana’s headstone.

His quick strides slowed, and he came to a stop several meters away from the grave, eyes wide. Gleaming gently in the light of the rising moon, large-petaled flowers rose up from the soft earth, their long green leaves swaying along with the thin stems in the soft wind. A clump of silvery-violet flowers waltzed lazily on either side of the headstone, their full blooms the most beautiful that Allen had ever seen.

Hesitantly he walked closer, kneeling down at the stone and reaching out to touch the silky petals. They were definitely real. He looked around, half expecting to see tall-dark-and-angry’s silhouette nearby, but there was nobody there. Eyes stinging, he turned back to the headstone and bowed his head, his lips curled in a smile.

“Looks like he really was sick of me stealing flowers from his garden,” Allen said quietly. “He planted some right here so I wouldn’t need to anymore.”

He leaned back, still smiling, and looked up at the stars.

“I don’t really get him at all, Mana,” he said. “He always acts like such a jerk, but there’s no way that’s all there is to him. I already figured there was more to it, but now he’s given actual proof. Not that he’ll admit it if I ask him about it.”

Allen looked back at the flowers.

“I wonder why he’s so determined to prove he doesn’t care about anything?”

**Author's Note:**

> So I found this idea on tumblr under the title "Awful AU" where person A has been stealing flowers from person B's garden to take to a loved one's grave, then one day B catches them and demands to see the person A was stealing flowers for. The entire way to the cemetery, person A sweats about how to break the bad news.


End file.
